By Joseph Pilkerton, Founder and COO, FirstBest
My co-founders and I joined other FirstBesters in making the annual treks to three key industry conferences in Orlando this spring. At NCCI, ACORD and IASA, we saw fresh optimism for the industry and noticed an overarching theme. The current economic environment is compelling carriers to look at their fundamental operations and get Back to Bascis.
Kicking off the show season, I attended NCCI’s Annual Issues Symposium in May where FirstBest was a program sponsor. I spoke with a number of carrier executives and heard some excellent presentations. One of the best aspects of this NCCI Symposium is that the organization reveals its preliminary analysis and research from the prior year and makes sound recommendations to the industry. In this newsletter, we’ve included an article that summarizes some of the 2008 reports and forecasts for the industry. A statement at NCCI that really caught my attention, and affirms the “Back to Basics” theme we are also hearing from customers, came from an Insurance Information Institute presentation, where the Institute’s President called out key differences in the P/C Insurance Post-Financial Catastrophe World, including, “Back to Basics: Insurers will return to their underwriting roots. The extended period of low investment exerts the most pressure to generate underwriting profits since the 1960s.”
Next came ACORD/LOMA Insurance Systems Forum, where our customer, AMERISAFE, Inc., spoke about their use of the FirstBest Underwriting Management System to transform their underwriting operations. The case study, titled “Modernizing and Optimizing Underwriting Operations,” filled the room. Our team met with several analysts, consultants and members of the press to share details about our newly released FirstBest Agent. The agent portal includes a real-time Dashboard and the industry’s first App Forms Reader, an automatic form image translator that transforms an ACORD Form PDF or image into XML and allows instant upload. The team returned with renewed enthusiasm about ways the FirstBest UMS and FirstBest Agent can enable true ease-of-doing business and help transform the underwriting process for greater profitability.
Also at ACORD, we accepted third place for INN's 2009 VIP Best Practices on behalf of ICW Group. The prestigious VIP (Vanguard in Practices) was given by Insurance Networking News and Celent for ICW Group’s deployment of FirstBest UMS.
Finally, at IASA, Julian Pelenur, Founder/CTO of FirstBest joined me to discuss how our solution can help P&C carriers improve their underwriting productivity and profitability. We also attended the IASA Technology Achievement Award ceremony where ICW Group was awarded the First Honorable Mention for results derived from their successful implementation of the FirstBest UMS. Go ICW Group! On the speaking front, Ed Gray, made great contributions to a panel about the changing talent pool, and Julian joined Vincent Gagliano, VP of Operations Analysis at AMERISAFE, Inc., to share ideas and lessons learned from “Achieving ROI through Better Underwriting.”
Overall, the spring conference series was a success for all who made the trips to the Sunshine State. I observed the sector motivated to make strategic investments in IT and in their businesses. It was clear that declining investment portfolios have escalated the need to go back to focusing on business basics: improving efficiencies, quality and profitability.